Bruce Prichard On Shane McMahon Owning WCW, Talent’s Reaction At Nitro, Shane’s Match vs. Vince McMahon At WrestleMania X-Seven

In a recent edition of Something to Wrestle, Bruce Prichard discussed Shane McMahon owning WCW, Shane’s match against Vince McMahon at WrestleMania X-Seven, and much more. You can read his comments below.

Bruce Prichard on the idea behind Shane McMahon becoming the storyline owner of WCW: “Well, I think when you look at storylines and hostile takeovers with family members a lot of times, it happens every day in big business. So, the idea was to have one of [Vince’s] family members go down and scoop it out from under him. The logical person at that point was Shane because we had the match coming up with Vince and Shane at WrestleMania, so it was able to heed into that storyline, and later on, Stephanie with ECW and the whole kids vs. the dad scenario that came from that. Shane was a strong character, and there was back in the crazy days of what if we bought WCW and ran it as a complete separate entity and had two separate companies? The two didn’t cooperate – you go run our business, we’ll go run our business. Just those kind of scenarios took us back to Shane being the one to buy it out from Vince.”

On WCW talent’s reaction to Shane at Nitro: “The whole thing was weird. The whole day was a lot of unknowns. The whole day was a lot of what ifs and unknowns from the standpoint of, we didn’t know what we were walking into. The poor folks at WCW had no idea what was walking into them. It all happened so fast. It was like, ‘This is what you have to do.’ You have to go in and talk to them, not even knowing really what we were going to do because we hadn’t even seen the other side of that business proposal. We had purchased assets, certain assets that we were interested in like the tape library, some of the equipment, and things of that nature. Once it became clear that TNT and TBS didn’t want to have anything to do with wrestling anymore, that changed the whole dynamic of what we thought we might have been interested in and that’s why it went in a fire sale, basically, for lack of a better term. So, we didn’t have a lot of answers.

“Going into it, the WCW guys, I think most of them wanted jobs. They didn’t want to be out on the street and wondering what am I going to do next. But a lot of them had contracts with AOL Time Warner that were gonna be paid out. Some did, some didn’t. We still had not been able to have access to go through all that shit, so there was no way to give them a lot of answers. I thought Shane handled it like a champ. Shane addressed everyone. When everyone got there – the agents, the talent – I thought everybody worked great with us that day. Shit, it was a scary time. Nobody knew. They didn’t know what their future was. We didn’t know what their future was. It wasn’t like we could say, ‘Hey man, this is all going to be OK,’ because we didn’t know. We said, ‘We are going to get into this. We are gonna look at it, and we are going to let everybody know as soon as we make a decision and understand exactly what it is that we have.”

On Shane’s match against Vince McMahon at WrestleMania X-Seven: “It was so, so good. People say Linda was the odd one out, and you look at throughout that storyline, which was a crazy storyline that could never be replicated hopefully ever – standing up out of a wheelchair and got one of the biggest pops of the entire night….It was just classic. A beautiful combination to the end of the story, and I think a little bit of relief because it got pulled off as well as it did.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit Something to Wrestle with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.